This utility converts sample database files from a foreign binary format (abi) to the native format. This is required when moving sample files to a (host) system other than the one used for collection (target system), and the host and target systems are different architectures. The abi format of the sample files to be imported is described in a text file located in $SESSION_DIR/abi. If you are unsure if your target and host systems have compatible architectures (in regard to the OProfile ABI), simply diff a $SESSION_DIR/abi file from the target system with one from the host system. If any differences show up at all, you must run the opimport command.

The oparchive command should be used on the machine where the profile was taken (target) in order to collect sample files and all other necessary information. The archive directory that is the output from oparchive should be copied to the system where you wish to perform your performance analysis (host).

The following command converts an input sample file to the specified output sample file using the given abi file as a binary description of the input file and the curent platform abi as a binary description of the output file. (NOTE: The ellipses are used to make the example more compact and cannot be used in an actual command line.)

# opimport -a /tmp/foreign-abi -o /tmp/imported/.../GLOBAL_POWER_EVENTS.200000.1.all.all.all /tmp/archived/var/lib/.../mprime/GLOBAL_POWER_EVENTS.200000.1.all.all.all

Since opimport converts just one file at a time, an example shell script is provided below that will perform an import/conversion of all sample files in a samples directory collected from the target system.

#!/bin/bash
#Usage: my-import.sh <foreign-abi-fullpathname>

# NOTE: Start from the "samples" directory containing the "current" directory
# to be imported

mkdir current-imported
cd current-imported; (cd ../current; find . -type d ! -name .) |xargs mkdir
cd ../current; mv stats ../StatsSave; find . -type f | while read line; do opimport  -a $1 -o ../current-imported/$line $line; done; mv ../StatsSave stats;

Example usage: Assume that on the target system, a profile was collected using a session-dir of /var/lib/oprofile, and then oparchive -o profile1 was run. Then the profile1 directory is copied to the host system for analysis. To import the sample data in profile1, you would perform the following steps:

$cd profile1/var/lib/oprofile/samples
$my-import.sh `pwd`/../abi

If the OProfile ABI is truly different on host and target machines, then the end result of running the above script will place the converted (i.e., imported) files into the current-imported directory. By default, opreport and other post-profiling tools will look for samples in samples/current of the specified session directory. So you should either rename current-imported to current or specify the session specification of session:current-imported when running post-profiling tools.

If the OProfile ABI is the same on the host and target machines, the my-import.sh script will print the following message for each sample file:

input abi is identical to native. no conversion necessary.